Buried Alive: a Tale of These Days - Arnold Bennett (books to read for self improvement txt) 📗

and Priam read by her side in an easy-chair, and about two o'clock, just before the first beginnings of dawn, they stimulated themselves into a feverish activity beneath the parlour gas. Alice prepared tea, bread-and-butter, and eggs, passing briskly from room to room. Alice also ran upstairs, cast a few more things into a valise and a bag already partially packed, and, locking both receptacles, carried them downstairs. Meantime the whole of Priam's energy was employed in having a bath and in shaving. Blood was shed, as was but natural at that ineffable hour. While Priam consumed the food she had prepared, Alice was continually darting to and fro in the house. At one moment, after an absence, she would come into the parlour with a mouthful of hatpins; at another she would rush out to assure herself that the indispensable keys of the valise and bag with her purse were on the umbrella-stand, where they could not be forgotten. Between her excursions she would drink thirty drops of tea.

"Now, Priam," she said at length, "the water's hot. Haven't you finished? It'll be getting light soon."

"Water hot?" he queried, at a loss.

"Yes," she said. "To wash up these things, of course. You don't suppose I'm going to leave a lot of dirty things in the house, do you? While I'm doing that you might stick labels on the luggage."

"They won't need to be labelled," he argued. "We shall take them with us in the carriage."

"Oh, Priam," she protested, "how tiresome you are!"

"I've travelled more than you have." He tried to laugh.

"Yes, and fine travelling it must have been, too! However, if you don't mind the luggage being lost, I don't."

During this she was collecting the crockery on a tray, with which tray she whizzed out of the room.

In ten minutes, hatted, heavily veiled, and gloved, she cautiously opened the front door and peeped forth into the lamplit street She peered to right and to left. Then she went as far as the gate and peered again.

"Is it all right?" whispered Priam, who was behind her.

"Yes, I think so," she whispered.

Priam came out of the house with the bag in one hand and the valise in the other, a pipe in his mouth, a stick under his arm, and an overcoat on his shoulder. Alice ran up the steps, gazed within the house, pulled the door to silently, and locked it. Then beneath the summer stars she and Priam hastened furtively, as though the luggage had contained swag, up Werter Road towards Oxford Road. When they had turned the corner they felt very much relieved.

They had escaped.

It was their second attempt. The first, made in daylight, had completely failed. Their cab had been followed to Paddington Station by three other cabs containing the representatives and the cameras of three Sunday newspapers. A journalist had deliberately accompanied Priam to the booking office, had heard him ask for two seconds to Weymouth, and had bought a second to Weymouth himself. They had gone to Weymouth, but as within two hours of their arrival Weymouth had become even more impossible than Werter Road, they had ignominiously but wisely come back.

Werter Road had developed into the most celebrated thoroughfare in London. Its photograph had appeared in scores of newspapers, with a cross marking the abode of Priam and Alice. It was beset and infested by journalists of several nationalities from morn till night. Cameras were as common in it as lamp-posts. And a famous descriptive reporter of the Sunday News had got lodgings, at a high figure, exactly opposite No. 29. Priam and Alice could do nothing without publicity. And if it would be an exaggeration to assert, that evening papers appeared with Stop-press News: "5.40. Mrs. Leek went out shopping," the exaggeration would not be very extravagant. For a fortnight Priam had not been beyond the door during daylight. It was Alice who, alarmed by Priam's pallid cheeks and tightened nerves, had devised the plan of flight before the early summer dawn.

They reached East Putney Station, of which the gates were closed, the first workman's train being not yet due. And there they stood. Not another human being was abroad. Only the clock of St. Bude's was faithfully awakening every soul within a radius of two hundred yards each quarter of an hour. Then a porter came and opened the gate--it was still exceedingly early--and Priam booked for Waterloo in triumph.

"Oh," cried Alice, as they mounted the stairs, "I quite forgot to draw up the blinds at the front of the house." And she stopped on the stairs.

"What did you want to draw up the blinds for?"

"If they're down everybody will know instantly that we've gone. Whereas if I--"

She began to descend the stairs.

"Alice!" he said sharply, in a strange voice. The muscles of his white face were drawn.

"What?"

"D--n the blinds. Come along, or upon my soul I'll kill you."

She realized that his nerves were in active insurrection, and that a mere nothing might bring about the fall of the government.

"Oh, very well!" She soothed him by her amiable obedience.

In a quarter of an hour they were safely lost in the wilderness of Waterloo, and the newspaper train bore them off to Bournemouth for a few days' respite.


The Nation's Curiosity


The interest of the United Kingdom in the unique case of Witt v. Parfitts had already reached apparently the highest possible degree of intensity. And there was reason for the kingdom's passionate curiosity. Whitney Witt, the plaintiff, had come over to England, with his eccentricities, his retinue, his extreme wealth and his failing eyesight, specially to fight Parfitts. A half-pathetic figure, this white-haired man, once a connoisseur, who, from mere habit, continued to buy expensive pictures when he could no longer see them! Whitney Witt was implacably set against Parfitts, because he was convinced that Mr. Oxford had sought to take advantage of his blindness. There he was, conducting his action regardless of his blindness. There he was, conducting his action regardless of expense. His apartments and his regal daily existence at the Grand Babylon alone cost a fabulous sum which may be precisely ascertained by reference to illustrated articles in the papers. Then Mr. Oxford, the youngish Jew who had acquired Parfitts, who was Parfitts, also cut a picturesque figure on the face of London. He, too, was spending money with both hands; for Parfitts itself was at stake. Last and most disturbing, was the individual looming mysteriously in the background, the inexplicable man who lived in Werter Road, and whose identity would be decided by the judgment in the case of Witt v. Parfitts. If Witt won his action, then Parfitts might retire from business. Mr. Oxford would probably go to prison for having sold goods on false pretences, and the name of Henry Leek, valet, would be added to the list of adventurous scoundrels who have pretended to be their masters. But if Witt should lose--then what a complication, and what further enigmas to be solved! If Witt should lose, the national funeral of Priam Farll had been a fraudulent farce. A common valet lay under the hallowed stones of the Abbey, and Europe had mourned in vain! If Witt should lose, a gigantic and unprecedented swindle had been practised upon the nation. Then the question would arise, Why?

Hence it was not surprising that popular interest, nourished by an indefatigable and excessively enterprising press, should have mounted till no one would have believed that it could mount any more. But the evasion from Werter Road on that June morning intensified the interest enormously. Of course, owing to the drawn blinds, it soon became known, and the bloodhounds of the Sunday papers were sniffing along the platforms of all the termini in London. Priam's departure greatly prejudiced the cause of Mr. Oxford, especially when the bloodhounds failed and Priam persisted in his invisibility. If a man was an honest man, why should he flee the public gaze, and in the night? There was but a step from the posing of this question to the inevitable inference that Mr. Oxford's line of defence was really too fantastic for credence. Certainly organs of vast circulation, while repeating that, as the action was sub judice, they could say nothing about it, had already tried the action several times in their impartial columns, and they now tried it again, with the entire public as jury. And in three days Priam had definitely become a criminal in the public eye, a criminal flying from justice. Useless to assert that he was simply a witness subpoenaed to give evidence at the trial! He had transgressed the unwritten law of the English constitution that a person prominent in a cause celebre belongs for the time being, not to himself, but to the nation at large. He had no claim to privacy. In surreptitiously obtaining seclusion he was merely robbing the public and the public's press of their inalienable right.

Who could deny now the reiterated statement that he was a bigamist?

It came to be said that he must be on his way to South America. Then the public read avidly articles by specially retained barristers on the extradition treaties with Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Chili, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The curates Matthew and Henry preached to crowded congregations at Putney and Bermondsey, and were reported verbatim in the Christian Voice Sermon Supplement, and other messengers of light.

And gradually the nose of England bent closer and closer to its newspaper of a morning. And coffee went cold, and bacon fat congealed, from the Isle of Wight to Hexham, while the latest rumours were being swallowed. It promised to be stupendous, did the case of Witt v. Parfitts. It promised to be one of those cases that alone make life worth living, that alone compensate for the horrors of climate, in England. And then the day of hearing arrived, and the afternoon papers which appear at nine o'clock in the morning announced that Henry Leek (or Priam Farll, according to your wish) and his wife (or his female companion and willing victim) had returned to Werter Road. And England held its breath; and even Scotland paused, expectant; and Ireland stirred in its Celtic dream.


Mention of Two Moles


The theatre in which the emotional drama of Witt Parfitts was to be played, lacked the usual characteristics of a modern place of entertainment. It was far too high for its width and breadth; it was badly illuminated; it was draughty in winter and stuffy in summer, being completely deprived of ventilation. Had it been under the control of the County Council it would have been instantly condemned as dangerous in case of fire, for its gangways were always encumbered and its exits of a mediaeval complexity. It had no stage, no footlights, and all its seats were of naked wood except one.

This unique seat was occupied by the principal player, who wore a humorous wig and a brilliant and expensive scarlet costume. He was a fairly able judge, but he had mistaken his vocation; his rare talent for making third-rate jokes would have brought him a fortune in the world of musical comedy. His salary was a hundred a week; better comedians have earned less. On the present occasion he was in the midst of a double row of fashionable hats, and beneath the hats were the faces of fourteen feminine relatives and acquaintances. These hats performed the function of 'dressing' the house. The principal player endeavoured to behave as though under the illusion that he was alone in his glory, but he